OCTOBER 13, 1997:DENIS JOHNSON believes fervently in despair. His fifth novel,
Already Dead: A California Gothic, establishes him as the
high priest of literary losers--sorry self-haters who drift through
life wishing to be anywhere but here. For Johnson, misery is the
constant drone note of existence, and the characters he assembles
in the coastal woods of Northern California are an accursed lot
indeed: pot growers, burned-out hippie chicks, coke dealers, hitmen.
Even the dogs wind up with names like "Fucker."

From these broken bits of humanity, Johnson assembles his most
intense, revelatory novel since Angels, the 1977 debut
which brought him critical raves and a slew of maladjusted fans.
Since then, Johnson has established himself as a novelist with
the large, messy talent of a hard-boiled poet. He's prone to writing
desolate tales with snappy dialogue about private detectives,
criminals, law enforcement and anyone else functioning at a high
level of malfeasance. These good and bad guys waltz around each
other, wearing masks of right and wrong which eventually have
to be swept aside so that we can get to the real issue that interests
Johnson--redemption.

In Johnson's world, grace resides within wretchedness; only those
who've fallen down and crawled through mud are likely to look
up and glimpse the light. Van Ness, the antihero of Already
Dead, is a malignant drifter who's survived a suicide attempt
and been resurrected as the Bad-Kirk flipside of his former Good-Kirk
self. He is Bushido, as his co-conspirator Nelson Fairchild
explains, a Japanese samurai concept that invites the warrior
to achieve total detachment by regarding himself as already dead.
"I invite the would-be suicide to adopt this concept,"
quips Fairchild.

And adopt it he does. Freed from the trappings of conventional
morality, Van Ness is at liberty to invent his own. As it turns
out, his idea of justice is an arbitrary one based on a quick
glance at Nietzsche. ("Who reads Nietzsche?" asks Fairchild.
"Have you ever tried to spell Nietzsche?") Fairchild,
a miserable cad and a pot-grower by trade, asks Van Ness to kill
his wife for the simple, film-noir reason that it will make him
rich. Only after he's made the request does Fairchild realize
he's unleashed demons on his life.

This is where the gothic comes in. In Already Dead, California
itself is gothic. Johnson takes the purple, sandalwood
aura of New Age and post-hippie culture and bottom-lights it to
cast menacing shadows: The sentient redwoods, the wiccan witches,
the water sprites of the coastline choking on brush fires--all
are exaggerated, grotesque, and very nearly possessed. In this
novel, surfer dudes eat their enemies' hearts roasted on a spit
while the fog rolls in on a landscape as desolate and watchful
as any British moor. Meanwhile, witches cast psychedelic spells
on unlucky lawmen and somewhere in the hills, a seven-foot, paranoid
man with the monstrous name of Frankheimer lurks.

All this is rich grist for a deconstructionist murder mystery
that doesn't really go the places murder mysteries usually go--rather,
the plot serves as a kind of framework for the moments Johnson
is a master at creating: violent episodes of grief or loss where
the trappings of reality fall away; moments of disorientation
or pain that open windows to hazed or ecstatic states. Johnson
is fascinated with the edges of consciousness where identity begins
to disintegrate. He's probably our most skilled living author
when it comes to evoking the mental lurches of the insane and
people on drugs. An example: "The traveling salesman had
fed me pills that made the linings of my veins feel scraped out."

He's also a master at wedding the sacred to the profane, constructing
sacrosanct moments from everyday events. "The facts are all
spiritual facts," Fairchild says; and indeed as the book
progresses nearly every action of every character takes on the
glowing intensity of a doomed crusade. Deeds as simple as using
a urinal get described as "the sound of piss jingling in
a great and terrible and enchanted silence."

Considering all the power that accumulates by the end of this
novel, the first hundred pages are disappointingly slow. Johnson
takes elaborate pains to set up the plot, and sometimes it feels
as though one ought to be taking notes on who is doing what to
whom. This is especially surprising from a writer whose short
stories (collected in the 1992 Jesus' Son) are so fervent
and compact. But it's well worth the effort to follow the initial
meanderings of Already Dead until the tale gathers the
murky luminosity for which Johnson is known.